As every parent knows, a child cannot be watched every minute of the day, even in their own home. In fact, children are quite often left unattended for five, ten or even fifteen minutes without any adult supervision. Due to children's curiosity, children often get into trouble when the parent or the child's caretaker is distracted for just a few minutes. Accordingly, it is important for parents, day cay care centers, baby sitters and other child caretakers to child-proof their homes for young children, especially in the one to four year old range.
One of the most common accidents for young children in the home is childhood poisoning. In fact, a large number of serious illnesses, and even fatalities, occur each year to young children due to children consuming poison household products or medicines. Many of these accidents could have been prevented by keeping these dangerous products stored in places unaccessible to young children.
In view of this problem of childhood poisonings, numerous efforts have been made to develop child-proof enclosures or latch mechanisms, which would prevent young children from opening the enclosure, and yet still allow relatively easy access by adults. Examples of some prior patented devices are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 1,152,404 to Eldridge; U.S. Pat. No. 2,233,699 to Gorrell, U.S. Pat. No. 2,759,782 to Goodwin; U.S. Pat. No. 3,519,299 to Goodwin; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,286,809 to Goodwin.
As mentioned in U.S. Pat. No. 3,519,299 to Goodwin and U.S. Pat. No. 4,286,809 to Goodwin, many of these prior art safety latch mechanisms are based on the differences between children's hands and their manual dexterity from that of adults. Accordingly, many prior art latch mechanisms require the hand span of an adult to effect release of the catch, and/or manual dexterity that is beyond the scope of children and yet still within the scope of adults.
However, these prior art devices suffer from many disadvantages. In particular, many of these devices are attached to the exterior surface of the enclosure, and thus are always visible. Some, like the one disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,286,809 to Goodwin, even require the exterior of the enclosure to be permanently altered to accommodate the latch mechanism. This type of latch mechanism is not typically acceptable for expensive kitchen and bathroom cabinets and drawers.
Other prior art child-proof latch mechanisms are relatively expensive and some are often even difficult for adults to operate. Moreover, many of these prior art devices can only be used on certain types of enclosures. Thus, different latch mechanisms must be used for drawers than those used for cabinets. In other words, often several different types of latch mechanisms must be purchased to child-proof one's home depending upon the types of cabinets and/or drawers to be secure in the home. Moreover, many of these latch mechanisms cannot be placed in a "null" position for deactivating the latch mechanism without having disassemble or remove the latch mechanism from the enclosure.
In view of the above, it will be apparent to those skilled in the art from this disclosure that there exists a need for an improved infant safety latch mechanism which can be easily retrofitted to a wide variety of enclosures, including cabinets with swinging doors and drawers. Accordingly, this invention addresses this need in the art, along with other needs which will become apparent to those skilled in the art once given this disclosure.